SSD Drives for Mac Pro Boot Drive?

Got the drive installed albeit a bit hacked, had to remove the two screws on the SATA dock inside the HDD bay, the door won't close for now. Ordered an IcyDock, will install correctly when it arrives. In the meantime, did the firmware update, no problems (drive was in Bay 2), installed Snow Leopard. Pretty amazing performance increase on my Mac Pro 1,1.

Question: I know I need to set the stripe size to 128k, but I do not know how to do so. Don't see any settings in Disk Utility and couldn't find any instructions online. Thanks for the help.
 
Question: I know I need to set the stripe size to 128k, but I do not know how to do so. Don't see any settings in Disk Utility and couldn't find any instructions online. Thanks for the help.
It's under options. Take a look here, as it might help (screen shots too).
 
I have a SSD coming in the next couple days. I had my Mac Pro off this morning, and I thought I'd take a look how easy it's going to be to put the SSD in the optical bay.

I've watched video on OWC, I've read the Apple manual describing how to remove/ replace. I can't get the drive sled to come out. It's moving maybe a couple cm (1/2") and then it feels like it's getting caught up on something, I don't want to yank on it too hard, I'm giving it a decent amount of force, any harder it feels like something might break or bend out of shape.

Any ideas?
 
I have a SSD coming in the next couple days. I had my Mac Pro off this morning, and I thought I'd take a look how easy it's going to be to put the SSD in the optical bay.

I've watched video on OWC, I've read the Apple manual describing how to remove/ replace. I can't get the drive sled to come out. It's moving maybe a couple cm (1/2") and then it feels like it's getting caught up on something, I don't want to yank on it too hard, I'm giving it a decent amount of force, any harder it feels like something might break or bend out of shape.

Any ideas?
I did this the other day. You probably need a little gentle force, but not too much. the cabling for the two OB's shouldn't be getting stuck on anything in particular, though maybe it has become "shorter" (moving back into the machine) since it was originally installed during shipping (?)
I found it wasn't as easy to pull out as say the main HDD bays are if you get my meaning.
 
I did this the other day. You probably need a little gentle force, but not too much. the cabling for the two OB's shouldn't be getting stuck on anything in particular, though maybe it has become "shorter" (moving back into the machine) since it was originally installed during shipping (?)
I found it wasn't as easy to pull out as say the main HDD bays are if you get my meaning.

Yeah I got it out. Needed a little lift as it came out. it was catching on a curved part of the case.

Is it ok just hanging there on an angle?
 
Going from a 2 x 1TB RAID 0, it really doesn't feel that much quicker to be honest.

Hopefully once I use it for a while it will start to become more noticeable.
 
Yeah I got it out. Needed a little lift as it came out. it was catching on a curved part of the case.

Is it ok just hanging there on an angle?
I'v been told it's ok to just leave it hanging. I haven't had any issues with mine... yet (The SSD I'm talking about ;))

Going from a 2 x 1TB RAID 0, it really doesn't feel that much quicker to be honest.

Hopefully once I use it for a while it will start to become more noticeable.

Yeah... I know what you mean. Real world noticeable speed increases.... I had 4x1TB in Raid 0 with the "crappy" Apple Raid card, and I'm not yet as blown away as I thought I would be.
 
Going from a 2 x 1TB RAID 0, it really doesn't feel that much quicker to be honest.

Hopefully once I use it for a while it will start to become more noticeable.
It would be noticable with large sequential files, not random access. SSD is a better choice for random access (i.e. OS and applications).

Yeah... I know what you mean. Real world noticeable speed increases.... I had 4x1TB in Raid 0 with the "crappy" Apple Raid card, and I'm not yet as blown away as I thought I would be.
1. The Apple card is crap, and you're well aware of that one now. :eek: :p
2. See above. ;)

Besides, you have the SSD, so at least you've got a nice OS and applications drive. That should keep you "off the streets" for awhile there, Speed Junkie... :p
 
I'm a bit confused about the stripe setting. I went into disk utility and found the option, but it's under the RAID setting. I'm not using any RAID setup, just a single SSD for boot. Will setting the stripe size to 128k there still set the stripe size correctly for the drive? Is there anything else I need to do?

Thanks for the clarification.
 
I'm a bit confused about the stripe setting. I went into disk utility and found the option, but it's under the RAID setting. I'm not using any RAID setup, just a single SSD for boot. Will setting the stripe size to 128k there still set the stripe size correctly for the drive? Is there anything else I need to do?

Thanks for the clarification.

Stripe is only applicable to RAID0 arrays. It defines how much data is written to one drive in the array before switching to the next. With just one drive, you have a RAID0 array with an infinite stripe size! :p
 
I installed and SSD in my Mac Pro (2009) in bay 1 about a month ago and usually boots up in about 15 seconds. I have decided to fill all of the hard drive bays with 2tb drives so I moved the SSD to the lower optical bay and now it takes more than twice as long to boot up. Once booted up it runs just as fast as it always has. Is there something that has to be changed to get it back to booting up at the speed it use to be or is this a drawback of having the SSD in the lower optical bay?
 
I installed and SSD in my Mac Pro (2009) in bay 1 about a month ago and usually boots up in about 15 seconds. I have decided to fill all of the hard drive bays with 2tb drives so I moved the SSD to the lower optical bay and now it takes more than twice as long to boot up. Once booted up it runs just as fast as it always has. Is there something that has to be changed to get it back to booting up at the speed it use to be or is this a drawback of having the SSD in the lower optical bay?

THAT is very interesting... I have always had mine in the lower OB with boots of around 25 seconds. I always thought that the extra time I was getting compared to others was my raid card start up for my 4 1TB drives in the HDD bays...
 
THAT is very interesting... I have always had mine in the lower OB with boots of around 25 seconds. I always thought that the extra time I was getting compared to others was my raid card start up for my 4 1TB drives in the HDD bays...
The RAID card does add time to the boot process, as it's own firmware has to initialize as well (and in the case of Areca, they also run a PCIe bus test as well).

As per the ODD port booting slower with SSD than an HDD located port, this is the first I've heard of it. Perhaps Apple did something in the firmware (i.e. set the SATA to 1.5Gb/s)? :confused:
 
The RAID card does add time to the boot process, as it's own firmware has to initialize as well (and in the case of Areca, they also run a PCIe bus test as well).

As per the ODD port booting slower with SSD than an HDD located port, this is the first I've heard of it. Perhaps Apple did something in the firmware (i.e. set the SATA to 1.5Gb/s)? :confused:

All of mine are listed as 3Gb/s with AHCI. Can't speak for the guy having the problem, though.
 
All of mine are listed as 3Gb/s with AHCI. Can't speak for the guy having the problem, though.
3.0Gb/s is the spec used in the chipset, but I wasn't aware if there had been a change made in the firmware (to solve stability issues; this is done with some HDD's on RAID cards on occasion).

Good to know they didn't muck around with it though (and AHCI is enabled). :).
 
THAT is very interesting... I have always had mine in the lower OB with boots of around 25 seconds. I always thought that the extra time I was getting compared to others was my raid card start up for my 4 1TB drives in the HDD bays...

I don't have any raid setup on my machine. I wonder if it is searching which drive the OS installation is installed on. When booting up and it gets to the white screen it takes awhile before the apple logo shows up but when I had the SSD in bay 1 the apple logo would always come right up when it got to the white screen.

All of mine are listed as 3Gb/s with AHCI. Can't speak for the guy having the problem, though.

It shows mine listed at 3Gb/s with AHCI as well.
 
make sure after you change the drive/bay configurations you go to System Preferences and re-set your startup disk. especially if you have 4+ hard drives. scanning all drives for a boot volume can take 10-15 seconds and may be the cause of the increase in boot time you're describing.
 
make sure after you change the drive/bay configurations you go to System Preferences and re-set your startup disk. especially if you have 4+ hard drives. scanning all drives for a boot volume can take 10-15 seconds and may be the cause of the increase in boot time you're describing.

Thank you, that looks like it fixed it but seems like it still takes a few seconds longer than it was originally but that is better than twice as long.
 
SSD in optical bay

To install in the lower optical bay, can it just rest there loose or do you get some sort of adaptor. Presumably just a standard SATA cable will connect to the motherboard?
 
Thanks.

Just wondering about capacity. The total of my Library, System and Applications is about 120GB. For the Intel X25-M the largest capacity is 160GB - presumably this would be enough? I doubt I'll be adding new applications other than upgrades.

All 4 hard drive bays are filled - but I will have plenty of space on one drive to use as a scratch disk.

How much space does the boot drive (eg. the SSD) need for things like 'page outs' (which usually is low, I have 8GB RAM and it's plenty for my use).
 
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